As recommended in your Feb 2004 Upgrade issue I bought an Albatron KX18D ProII motherboard with AMD Athlon XP 2600+ processor and 512M of RAM. I started from scratch and installed Windows XP Pro. The problem I'm having appears to be some sort of device conflict between the motherboard onboard devices. Although Device Manager says there are no conflicts, the same IRQ is allocated to the nVidia nForce Audio Codec Interface and one of the OpenHCD USB Host Controllers.
What happens is when I'm using a simulator such as Nascar 2003 (which uses a lot of sound with speech and so on) or Grand Prix Legends, my USB modem dies. First it loses the ADSL link, and then the USB power goes. I've disabled all the USB power saving stuff, and have a new 400 watt power supply. The reason that this is a problem is that I want to play these games on-line.
I have the latest version of all drivers (motherboard, modem, BIOS, graphics card). I've emailed Albatron and had no reply. I've tried using a different USB port, but the modem doesn't work at all when I do that. My feeling is that if I separated the Audio and USB IRQs things would work, but of course with Plug and Play I can't do that.
I definitely feel it's something to do with the way the resources are being allocated, but there's no relevant help in the motherboard manual or on the Albatron website.
Hope you can help.
Christopher Edge, Lesmurdie, WA
You missed it! Have another look at your motherboard manual, mate.
In the section describing “PnP/PCI configuration” on page 32 you’ll see that changing the value for “Resources controlled by” to ‘Manual’ will allow you to manually assign values to devices. If you decide to try this, make sure you uninstall the device first, before rebooting into BIOS setup, so that the devices can be cleanly redetected and reinstalled when you boot into Windows afterwards.
However ... I don’t recommend that you try it at all! IRQ sharing is quite common, and the devices sharing the IRQ that you’ve described is a very commonplace situation indeed. On the system I’m typing this out, the onboard sound, USB controller and Ethernet controller are all sharing the one IRQ without any problems at all. On another system I have here, one USB controller is sharing an IRQ with FireWire, while another is sharing with Ethernet quite happily.
I’ll let you in on a little secret though. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m not too impressed with a lot of USB devices. I’d suggest you ensure that the ones you have are using external power supplies wherever possible, and using the rear I/O panel connectors for preference over front panel or ‘USB header’ ones. But I really think the main problem you have is simply that you’re using a USB ADSL modem!
That’s right! I don’t like the things. I’ve seen far too many reports of problems users have experienced using USB ADSL modems, and I believe Ethernet ADSL modems are a far superior choice. That opinion has been reinforced by my own experience as well. The modem I use is a USB/Ethernet combination one, and I’ve tried it out as a USB device. The connection quality was horrible! Using it as an Ethernet device, however, the only ‘drop-outs’ I’ve ever experienced were when the ISP was ‘down’, or when there’s been power ‘flicks’ during storms. To my way of thinking, the USB ADSL modem seems to be the ADSL world’s equivalent of the dodgy internal ‘WinModems’ often seen used for dial-up.
If upgrading your modem is an option for you, I’d also suggest that you ‘treat’ yourself to a model which provides an inbuilt Gateway/Router such as this
NetGear DG834 which at the time of writing is available on
‘Special’ at Scorpion Technology for $179. Or the even less expensive
Billion 5100 which can be found for less than $100. You mightn’t have need at present to connect other PCs to your Broadband connection, but it’s handy to be able to at a later date without having to purchase additional equipment. The hardware Firewall provided by the device is a definite ‘must’ for high quality protection of your system’s security.
There are other things you could try of course, such as uninstalling the modem and reinstalling it using a different USB controller (to avoid that ‘doesn’t work’ issue you mentioned above), or changing the IRQ allocations as you initially mentioned, but I just can’t go past the fact that your DSL-200 draws quite a lot of power, as USB devices go, and the fact that it’s rather over-represented in the discussions of modem problems that I’ve read!
Ethernet is the best option, I believe.
Cheers,
Terry O'Shanassy